Relax mode
It's fun to play Brainpipe stoned. Especially the sound and the visuals are great. The gameplay is, however, too difficult and stressful, in my opinion. For drug trips, I'd like especially this game to have an easy, relaxed mode. Not one formed just by adjusting some attributes in the game as it is now but rather by shifting the whole aim of play from a fight for survival to a smooth, continuous and perhaps endless experience.
I think that to make the gameplay smooth enough, a game session would need to be (potentially) endless or have a fixed finite length. To keep the arcade character of Brainpipe, it should probably be a score attack with fixed game session length.
The player should never need to think much about the game for maximizing her score - for example, it should be always beneficial to continue playing (and dodge enemies and collect glyphs). Bullet time shouldn't be penalized.
Here's what I think might work: The current content would stay in the game unchanged, including coma (while Coma wouldn't produce any score - it could be completely omitted as well). Player would be immortal in all the levels except Coma. Player would only get score for collecting glyphs and the score for each glyph would depend on the glyph's identity (position in the game) and a multiplier which would be equivalent to the (game, not real (bullet time slows down game time)) time passed without a crash (of the protagonist eye with an enemy). For example, each glyph might yield c*(1+sqrt(t)), where c is the score for the glyph in the current version, sqrt() is square root and t is the time passed since the last crash. Or it could be a common multiplier which linearly increases and reaches its maximum value in a fixed period of time (for example 10 seconds) - in such case it might need some vizualization - retina could be used as it would no longer be needed for health representation.
Last edited by TTT; March 7th, 2011 at 02:16 PM..
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